Draco is barely aware of his own senses, half-blind and exhausted from months upon months of corrosive fear, and whatever shred of reality is still allotted to him is in his father’s urgent grip on his shoulder and his mother’s hands around his and the way he leans on both of them.

lunabee34 says: "Tell me about the episode (or book chapter) that never appeared in one of your fandoms but should have."

Star Trek TNG: "The Price" is such a god-awful episode that when it leaves those two Ferengi in their shuttlecraft stranded in the Delta Quadrant and doesn't bother to tell us what became of them, that's not even the worst of its crimes. (The worst of its crimes is probably what Crusher and Troi wear to do aerobics.) Anyhow, yes, the Ferengi were acting like jerks, but they didn't deserve to die the kind of death that you'd die stranded in a shuttlecraft 30,000 light-years from home. I think either they should reappear as part of the Borg collective, or the Voyager crew should find them.

Due South: More Ray&Ray. Doesn't everyone want more Ray&Ray? Make RayK go to meet a new informant and discover that it's the Bookman.

The Princess Bride 2: the story of how Buttercup wound up being the Dread Pirate Roberts.

- There's a group of people who detest it on principle. Asked to define it, they create a definition that basically sorts everything into two categories: Things I Hate, Which Therefore Belong To the Genre I Hate, and Things I Like, Which Obviously Do Not Belong To the Genre I Hate. (Ask a classic rock fan who hates country about Crosby, Stills, & Nash. Or a classic sci-fi fan who hates fantasy about Pern.)

- Traditionally, about a third of it was worthless due to sentimentality.

- More recently, another third of it is worthless because capitalism endlessly churns it out in identical shiny plastic pieces.

- When it's bad, there's nothing worse.

- When it's good, it captures the human spirit so well that it brings tears to your eyes.

I'm gearing up to move again; now that I don't have to stay in the school district*, I'm looking at a couple of places that are smaller, cheaper, closer to work, and ideally a little less damp.

But of course the idea of touching every single item I own, again, is incredibly intimidating.

So I decided to try packing one box a day.

There's quite a lot of low-hanging fruit -- at least ten boxes that I never got around to unpacking two years ago when we moved here. I may very well bog down when it comes to starting from scratch. But here's two days' worth of progress:

Day 1

Packed: One box from the bedroom. Mostly books and miscellaneous desky stuff.

Discarded: One bag of books and three bags of clothes to Goodwill. Half a recycle bin's worth of paper.

Find of the day: A bunch of little spiral notebooks from the pre-Iowa days, when I used to get Saturday mornings alone to write. Much probably-doomed writing in there, including the title of a Discworld story ("Hard-Boiled Egg") and the summary of a Sherlock story ("Suicide by vampire. At least, that was the plan.") and about 500 words of a story I was going to write about how in an Alpha/Omega universe the end of fertility must be heralded by an Omegapause ("Everybody around him was so goddamned fucking young.").

Day 2

Packed: One box of cookbooks and other non-fragile kitcheny stuff.

Discarded: Another bag of books ready to go to Goodwill, and a garbage bag full of things which stop being edible after being left in a box on the living room floor for two years.

Find of the day: So that's where all the AA batteries were.

* Let's just take a moment to let that sink in. Barring really strange circumstances, I am finished with school districts. School districts will never again play a role in my real estate decisions. I am no longer the parent of a public school student. I have attended my last teacher conference, and probably also my last progress report.

Ten minutes later Harry’s drying his hair while staring in his own eyes in the mirror and not moping. Never mind that he's twenty-four and already feels due for a midlife crisis. Never mind that he’s desperate enough for human company that he's considering getting a haircut just for the awkward scalp massage (and even more awkward questions about his scar) while being shampooed and then inviting Dudley out for drinks. He is a fully grown adult making the adult decision of working the entire week leading up to Christmas Day, since there’s a conspicuous lack of other places to be, and he isn't going to start moping about it now.

“I'm not,” he tells his reflection decisively. His voice is hoarse from lack of use.

Anybody out there in Georgia's 6th Congressional District? There's a special election coming up for the House of Representatives -- the seat's open because Tom Price resigned to be part of the Trump Administration. Putting a non-Republican in that seat would be a serious public service.

The only way my experience differed from Teenygozer's was that every time I have any kind of professional service, the universe always seems to issue me some Shakespearean character; this time it was an anesthesiologist who (1) "diagnosed" me with sleep apnea because of the length of my chin (mind you, I'm pretty sure he's right, but come on), (2) treated me to a libertarian healthcare rant, and (3) wanted to chat about legal weed a little more than I was comfortable with in a person with his hand on the sedation pump.

No! It's not over! wanted_a_pony asks: Are there fandom(s) for which you *only* enjoy fanworks, but you don't intend to (or actively dislike) the canon whatever-it-is? What is/are they?

This is a great question, and the answer is: Most of them.

Fandoms for which I genuinely like the source material, and would enjoy it and seek it out whether there were fanworks or not: Due South. The Discworld books and Good Omens. Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Jeeves and Wooster (stories). The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings (novels). Horatio Hornblower (stories and novels). Georgette Heyer novels. Pixar movies. John Hughes movies. MASH.

Fandoms where the source material is entertaining, but fanworks add something significant to my engagement with it: Sherlock Holmes (storles and novels) and most of the Holmes movies/series1. Most any Disney cartoon (except Lilo & Stitch, which is perfect unto itself, perfect, I tell you2).

Fandoms where I really can't take the source material very seriously except as a kit that fans will take apart and reassemble into something actually worth our time: Marvel Cinematic Universe. James Bond movies. Harry Potter (both novels and movies). Angel (TV series). Star Trek (all series and all movies, including reboot). Stargate SG1 and Stargate Atlantis. Star Wars (original trilogy, The Force Awakens, and Rogue One). The Losers, the Magnificent Seven remake, and other such festivals of beefcake. Supernatural. Teen Wolf. X-Men. Inception. The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings (movies).

Fandoms where the source material is barely tolerable and redeemed only by the fanworks: Leverage. Star Wars (prequels). Merlin. And please forgive me, but: The Sentinel.

1Exception: The Ritchie movies. Beautiful as they are, I cannot enjoy these movies, and I cannot enjoy any fanworks based on them, because the relationship between Holmes and Watson is so full of resentment and hard feelings, and that relationship is really the main thing for me.

2Not that I wouldn't enjoy any Jumba/Pleakley fanworks you wanted to point me at.

How would your list be different from mine? This was a fascinating exercise.

And I'll be out of wifi range till Tuesday, but y'all know you can ask me a question anytime.

muccamukk asks: Moments in canon that still emotionally resonate with you, many years later.

A nice one to end the meme with!

- Fraser in "Asylum" saying, "You didn't shoot that man," and when Ray tries to talk him out of his certainty he says, "I know you."

- I'm not even especially fannish about these characters, but the moment in "The Breakfast Club" when Andrew the jock is talking to Allison the basket case about parents, and he says, "What do they do to you?" and she says, "They ignore me."

- I was sold on Harry Potter when the snake at the zoo said, "Brazil, here I come." It wasn't just the worldbuilding but the wit.

- Zelenka's description of Atlantis coming up from under the water -- he was speaking poetry, and if you didn't look up a translation, you'd never know.

- Any Sherlock Holmes adaptation is going to live or die in my esteem by how it treats John Watson. BBC Sherlock sold me in the exchange where Sherlock asks what John would be thinking if he were dying. "Please let me live," John says. Sherlock scoffs, "Use your imagination," and John says, "I don't have to."

Yeah, I skipped a day; I spent the evening at both a City Council meeting and an overlong school concert. (I feel sorry for the orchestra kids; by the time it's their turn, everybody's looking at their watches.)

kass asks: what fannish character is bringing you the most joy right now?

I'm ... not feeling the fannish joy right now.

Bits of it are there. There's a stage in every book I read, every movie I see, where I'm thinking, "Oh, hey, this person could be matched with that person ... this universe could cross over with that other universe." But somehow it doesn't catch.

I think there are two things going on:

1. The source media themselves are more fanfic-savvy now, and so nothing totally loses control of its subtext the way it used to in the old days.

I can't imagine anybody making entertainment in 2016 without being aware that viewers/readers will consider the possibility that characters are attracted to one another even if you didn't write them to be attracted to one another -- even if they are [gasp] the same gender. You'd have to be living under a rock on another planet to have missed that development.

And of course to the extent that this gets us actual non-heterosexual characters that's a great thing, though that part is not moving along quite as briskly as I would like.

But -- like, we're now getting classic Trek out of the library and watching it. And nothing equals the accidental subtext-fest that was classic Trek. I can see where the people who were slashing classic Trek could feel like they were totally stealing the archetypes and totally expressing the true nature of the show at the same time. There's nothing like that now.

2. I'm not interacting enough with fans (a situation that's unlikely to change until my nest goes empty next fall), and it's just no fun to be fannish alone.

kass asks: What do you enjoy most about parenting a kidlet of this age?

Oh, man, this age is the best. This age is ... when I think about it, it almost seems unethical. I have basically genetically engineered and hand-trained my own ideal roommate.

The parenting role starts out every-waking-hour-and-then-some at birth, and gradually, pretty steadily, shrinks. Getting accustomed to the shrinkage may be the challenge of parenthood -- remembering that six-year-olds don't need you to be responsible for most of their clothing choices and ten-year-olds don't need you to be responsible for their bladders and fourteen-year-olds don't need you to be responsible for their friendships.

By now, I don't really have to exercise my "authority." I have just enough superiority in life experience that I'm occasionally called upon to give advice, which is good for my ego, and just enough difference in personality type that I'm the Family List-Keeper, and that's about it.

(I didn't mind exercising authority when the kidlet was smaller and life required it, but it does take energy. It's very restful to be able to say, "Well, if you make that choice, what do you predict the consequences will be? OK, does that sound good to you? Cool, you've made a decision. Good talk.")

So the only thing I don't like about it is looking at the pileup of college mailings and knowing how soon it's going to end!

In the absence of a question for today, I'm just going to toss this out there:

I'm semi-voluntarily* devouring Ben Aaronovitch's "Rivers of London" novels and so far quite enjoying them. These are books that feature a cop who's an apprentice wizard, and also such supernatural characters as something kind of vampirish, something kind of dwarfish, something kind of goblinish, and the human incarnations of the spirits of all the rivers.

So the Rivers series is especially lovely in its sense of place, and in Moon Over Soho, I came upon this description:

Cheam is another typical outer London village that acquired, in short order, a railway station, some posh detached villas in the late-Victorian style, and finally a smothering blanket of mock-Tudor semis built in the 1930s. Cheam is what the green belt was established to prevent happening to the rest of southeast England. Pictures of Cheam adorn the walls of planning offices of every Home County to serve as an awful warning.

Which made me think, as one does, how much I'd like to see Aziraphale and Crowley in this universe.

It would be a challenge, since the Good Omens mythos is Christian (for values of Christian that are very interested in the Genesis and Revelation and not too much interested in anything in between) and the Rivers mythos is so cheerfully pagan. But that might be part of the fun -- poor Aziraphale would have a crisis if he had to admit that he liked a genius loci.

* By semi-voluntarily I mean that I'm enjoying them very much, but a long vacation and a Jeeves and Wooster anthology taught me not to binge-read the works of a single author in a single universe; too much risk of the author's quirks becoming annoying via repetition. HOWEVER, the library owned Book 1 and Book 5, so not unreasonably I put in a Request To Purchase form suggesting that they maybe consider buying Books 2, 3, and 4 ... and when they bought them, they immediately checked them out to me. So I'm trying to finish them before they're due back.

This was in 1989, so pre-internet. The spouse, who is comically inept at organization most of the time, somehow managed to put together this lovely tour of multiple bed-and-breakfast type places in multiple towns up and down through New England. It was mid-October, and the leaves were falling. We went to 18th-century graveyards in Boston, rented bicycles on Nantucket, visited the official shop of the official witch of Salem. Once it rained all day, and we stayed in the library of the inn we were staying at and read books, and the inn's two standard poodles (I still remember that one of them was named Lili Marlene) kept us very dignified company while wearing matching sweaters.

The one thing that we hadn't planned on was needing to spend one night on the road between New England and central Illinois. I was doing all the driving because we were in my car and the spouse couldn't drive stick yet, and when I hit the point of total driver's exhaustion, we stopped at a place called the Stardust Motor Inn near Schenectady, New York, which was the worst kind of no-name motel imaginable. The woman who checked us in was wearing green face makeup, and we had been out of touch for so long that it was only when we were in the room that we figured out that this was because it was Halloween.